Athlon MP Reviewed

RendEr writes "At The Tech Report, there's a review of AMD's latest multiprocessor chip, the Athlon MP 1900+. Watching this thing smoke through Linux kernel complies is a beautiful thing. Combined with AMD's new 760MPX chipset, these chips could help usher in a new era of cheap dual-processor desktop systems. "

Comments

Is it me?

[professortomoe]

Or does anyone else think AMD's new naming convention is nifty. I'm getting sick of everyone bragging about their ghzs.

Re:Is it me?

[_Ash_]

Well, the term XP sells. AMD knows that. There are still much more users running windows than anything else. And all (or at least most) of these users want Windows XP. So if they're going to buy a new PC and they see Athlon XP, they will get an urge to buy it. It's pure marketing technique.

Re:Is it me?

[nocent]

Or does anyone else think AMD's new naming convention is nifty. I'm getting sick of everyone bragging about their ghzs.

i agree with you regarding mhz is not everything. but what a coincidence. when AMD broke through the 1ghz barrier, they couldn't wait to brag about it. now that they're getting left behind mhz-wise by Intel and having trouble reaching 2ghz, suddenly, "clock speed is not an accurate indication of performance". if apple and amd had 3ghz chips, you can be sure they would be hyping that up like crazy.

p.s. it's nothing new. AMD and others used to do that eons ago with their old chips which led to tremendous confusion amongst users.

Re:Is it me?

[mrfiddlehead]

All they're doing is using Intel's chip speeds as an external comparison. So AMD's 1900+ runs at 1600Mhz but compares to a P4 1900MHz system. We're not going to get away from the MHz comparisons that easily, especially since it still remains the single most identifiable factor.

Psychologically it's a good move for AMD. Even though I know that their 1600MHz chip is faster than Intel's 1900MHz chip (or equivalent) I would still feel a bit, disempowered ... groan. And for those who do not know they are surely going to be suckered into Intel's super MHz sales pitch.

Ya gotta roll with the punches ...

Re:Is it me?

[nomadic]

Since when does Joe Public compare chips of different architectures? The naming convention is used by the non-computer literate, because traditionally it's been accurate; if you had a Pentium 233, and got a Pentium 333, it was faster. Seemed to work just then. Of course adding Athlons screwed it up a little, but it's still a good, general rule-of-thumb for comparing chip generations.

Reliability & Compatibility

[Detritus]

OK, it's very fast. That's nice. How reliable and compatible is the system? Those are my top priorities, esp. for a server. How well does it run with some random version of Linux or *BSD?

Re:Reliability & Compatibility

[Hast]

You need to get bigger / more fans. A friend of mine had problems with his Athlon because it didn't have proper cooling. (The fan was rated at the specific speed, it just didn't do the trick anyways.)

A new CPU fan later and his system is running nicely.

Yeah, but the systems are pretty had to find

[MurrayTodd]

I've thought for a while that the new Athlon MP systems would make great desktops--especially with what a dog the P4 is. The funny thing is that almost nobody actually makes an Athlon multiprocessor desktop. A few places make servers. Otherwise you're *almost* required to build a system from scratch. (It's doable, but still a pain.)

One online company that did have decent looking systems was Xi Computing, in case you're interested.

Slashdot?

[TheLink]

I figure it would be pretty useful for running something like Slashdot.

Or for running something that's being slashdotted ;).

For instance I've webapps that do about 30 pages/sec on a single processor PIII-550 (db+app on same server :( ). That's far from slashdot loads (>>60hits/s).

So if the load ever goes up, a Athlon MP 1800+ and 266MHz DDR RAM server would come in handy ;).

Definitely be useful for servers. I'll need to be reassured about thermal safety because our airconditioning isn't comfortably reliable. That said, AMD seems to be moving in the right directions, and it shouldn't be a big worry.

DB servers with Gigs of DDR RAM will kick ass. When you can do full table scans at 266MHz, who cares about the huge second level caches Sun boasts about.

Cheerio,
Link.

Re:Dual Processing...

[mr-spam-uk]

We use dual processor machines here as WORKSTATIONS.
Sure I can't see the point if we are talking about having a DP machine at home for your personal use, but in industry time = money. The amount of time our artists spend waiting for photoshop to filter an image or our programmers have to sit and wait for a compile to run IS an issue for us. That and maybe, if they have to wait a while we'd like them to be able to get on with something else in the mean time.
I'm a programmer, I quit frequently have 2 or 3 compiles running at the same time, as I'm hooked up to test hardware downloading a buld and testing/debugging it.

Re:MP 1900+ same as XP 1900+

[Sloppy]

Of course, all socket A chips are good for SMP use.

Excuse me, you look like someone who might have a clue. :-) Do you know if you can mix and match different types? Could I use one of these new MP 1900+ with an "old" 1 GHz Thunderbird on the same motherboard?